Why is it so clunky to embed a video in a web page?

It’s pretty damn wonky, and it’s not overtly political in the normal sense, but there’s an interesting piece in AppleInsider on a brewing HTML 5.0 standards battle, that I think might surprise some locals as to Microsoft’s history of anticompetitive practices, and how its relentless opposition to open standards has adversely impacted both web developers and consumers alike.

I don’t ever remember reading coverage like this in the local press, but perhaps I just missed it.

Well, if MS fully embraces HTML 5 they cut out 75-90% of the business case for Silverlight.

What’s really ridiculous is their refusing to support revisions to CSS that make it possible, for example, to put rounded corners on rectangles with one or two lines of code (instead of kludgey Javascript/image workarounds). Firefox, Safari, Opera, everybody else has it, but the word is MS will get it in Internet Explorer sometime in the next decade. This is apparently in hopes of keeping people locked in to IE (still with twice the market share of all the other browsers put together), but gambling that coders will still design for IE, remember those “this website looks best in IE” banners back around the turn of the century?

It’s a gamble because just about anybody serious is designing for something standards-compliant like Firefox (essential for future-proofing if you intend your code to work more than a few years) and either adding in IE-specific workarounds, using a Javascript library (like Scriptaculous or Jquery) with its own built-in workarounds, or just saying the hell with it and let IE’s chips fall where they may.

What is most interesting is the lack of direct hardware support for some of these codecs. That is what makes h.264 nice on an iPhone. I kind of wish that Adobe and Microsoft would get together and come up with a way to offload support for their plugins to a hardware chip. I use Netflix Watch Now that runs on Silverlight but it uses a lot of CPU on the Mac Book Pro compared to quicktime and h.264. The on going tension between software and general cpu vs. hardware decoders.

We also may very well get to the point where Javascript would benefit from a dedicated hardware processing unit as significant as it is to applications in the browser space.

Also, Goldy you may be interested in Video For Everybody which illustrates a way to seamlessly integrate all the codecs and Flash together in a way that elegantly degrades across different browser, configurations and capabilities.

I think what will happen is that IE will continue to become ghettoized in terms of cool feature support. Web developers will continue to support IE in terms of the bare bones features but will start to put less and less effort trying to implement all the hacks and workarounds that try to shoe horn in support for IE that it never supported in the first place. The other interesting effect is that the average user might not be aware of the differences. Someone who uses IE all the time will take for granted the way web pages work and may never realize how much more advanced and clean the design might be in other more standards compliant browsers. One place where this will be significant is in Font handling abilities. IE 6 hurts my eyes when I look at it compared to Safari. Javascript performance is another area and then there is all the CSS enabled UI that is just not possible on IE.

The key point about CSS is the cascading aspect of it. Just let things degrade gracefully. Treat IE like the second tier browser that it really is.

Why not only use IE for MSFT (official stock symbol) activities and use more standards based browsers for all else? Fall back to IE when needed but use better browsers for the rest of the story. The masses will force MSFT to improve their browser.

Shocked as I am at your unusually civil tone, you abominable racist filth-spewing git, it pains me to point out that IE is not available for all platforms. For example, over two-thirds of mobile browser use today comes from iPhones and iPods, most of it Mobile Safari.

This might be another reason why it is rumored that IE market share dropped 8% in the last month (though that’s not been released yet as they check to see if there’s a data problem, that’s a huge statistical anomaly). And even the US government has recommended replacing IE with Firefox for adequate security.

I suspect IE will live on in large corporations, where it can be customized and locked down, but even in that traditional M$FT stronghold the natives have grown resistant to upgrade churn, as shown by the extraordinarily slow adoption of Vista over XP there; some will probably skip over Vista and go to 7 directly, all of which impacts M$FT’s income pipe.

Btw, here’s another article on the HTML 5 codec issue from Ars Technica. Perhaps Theora isn’t quite as primitive, or H.264 as unencumbered, as AppleInsider asserts. For example, I hear the reason YouTube limits all videos to 12 minutes max (requiring people to break up longer ones into a series of smaller ones) is because they’d have to pay the patent managers of H.264 more for the privilege. As they always say, the first taste’s free.

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